TITLE: The 7 Columns of Mystics NAME: Elias Pschernig COUNTRY: Austria EMAIL: elias@users.sourceforge.net WEBPAGE: http://www.elias.f2s.com/pov/ TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: 7c.jpg ZIPFILE: 7c.zip RENDERER USED: PovRay MegaPov 0.7 Raytracer by D. K. Buck et.al. TOOLS USED: This is 100% handcoded pov. RENDER TIME: 20 hours 20 minutes HARDWARE USED: Processor 933-Mhz-Pentium-4 RAM 348 MB-PC133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I liked the topic Fantasy and Mystics, and instantly fired up megapov to start writing, without a certain topic in mind. (See the pbi newsgroup at news.povray.org about my "Entering IRTC" posting. http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/14173/) Using "Fantasy", I started adding stuff and tried creating a "Mystics" scene - and there you are, now I even have a story for it: The 7 columns were created by various mystical people to fight the bad Dark Druid, who built that ugly arch. Each column was planned to feature a different creature and theme, with the highlight of the picture being a spell in which all the different colors from the 7 columns would unite into a cool lighting effect. But I completely ran out of time. A final version is due to be posted by me to pbi in 1 ot 2 years as free time permits. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Not much to say, it is 100% hand coded pov - There you have the reason for it staying unfinished as of now. The candles are type 3 media and are an improved version of my povray 3.1 flame.inc include file. Originally they had all different colors, but i didn't like the colored look anymore after some time. The fog is a simple scattering media, which for some reason multiplied rendering time by a factor of 10. I guess I should have used a smaller container for it? Please someone tell me this, or why it is so slow! The knight, dragon, spider (unvisible) and skull (barely visible) are all pure constructive solid geometry objects, made of intersecting spheres, cylinders, boxes and torii. The dragon was placed on top of the column with trace. (You wouldn't believe me if I told you how much time I needed for any of those 4 objects) The columns are what took me the most (ridiculously much) time. I started with learning ISO-Surfaces for a week, just to find out that they were not useable at all for the purpose of large columns, with my poor(?) hardware. So I abandoned the idea and started writing lots of parsing code, and with a little help from the povray.newusers newsgroup managed to get quite some basic understanding of triangle meshes and vertex normals - Which I could use to create the wall in the back as well. The arch is just made of simple blocks - according to the topic idea it should stay in contrast to the rest of the image in just every aspect and thus will remain a simple block even in later versions (versions which I *will* do). I might have worked far more than 100 hours on this, counting in some nights before the monitor, unable to stop fiddling with some pov code parameters unless falling asleep over the keyboard :) Anyway, I liked creating this image a lot, and it's a shame I couldn't finish it yet.